Key Bored

So now that I have the GMMK, I decided to see just how bad my old Logitech G710 keyboard was after five years of service. It… wasn’t pretty. Imagine five years of never once cleaning it in a four cat household, and never even doing the usual cotton swabs soaked in rubbing alcohol every few months. Well, imagine no further!

Here it is with all of the key caps still installed:

And with the key caps removed, we can see that the cats were clearly rubbing themselves on it constantly while I wasn’t looking:

This was easily far worse than I had imagined. I was able to lift the matted down hair as if it were a woven carpet. Then I balled it up into a pressed representation of my failure as a tech geek. Observe:

I took outside to hit it with my high pressure air duster. I briefly considered firing up my air compressor, but figured the blower would be enough. Luckily, I was right! Aside from a few stray hairs, it ended up pretty clean:

Next came the rubbing alcohol bath with various cotton swabs and a microfiber cloth. Then I hit it with the blower again for good measure, making sure to really get in there with the attached brush. What I ended up with was almost shocking to behold:

Finally came the most arduous task of individually cleaning and polishing each individual key cap with a microfiber and rubbing alcohol before popping it back on. I planned ahead and took a picture of the keyboard so I had a working reference. I didn’t want to dig through the bucket of keys to put everything back in any particular order. When that was all done, I made one final pass with a microfiber to polish all of the piano black around the periphery. And viola:

This was certainly an adventure I don’t really want to reproduce anytime soon, but the keyboard was so filthy, it really needed a deep cleansing. If this happens again, I could presumably just hit it with the blower and spend an hour with a few swabs and rubbing alcohol while all the keys are still on. Either way, I can now put it in storage and rest assured it won’t mutate in the filth and eventually plot my demise.

Until Tomorrow,